Ryan King wrote:
> html5 defines rel="contact"[1] in a way that clashes with XFN[2],
> which has wide deployment on the web today.
>
> I suggest that rel="contact" be dropped from HTML5, since you can
> accomplish the same things with the existing combination of XFN+hCard.
>[...]
> 1. [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-links.html#link-type3]
> 2. http://gmpg.org/xfn/
While I understand the obvious conflict with existing microformat
content, I can't say that XFN's definition of "contact" is at all
intuitive. If I were to see |rel="contact"| in an HTML document without
knowing anything about XFN, my first thought would be that the hyperlink
points to contact information as opposed to being a link for the web
page of someone who is a contact. In fact, I don't know anyone I'd refer
to as a "contact", and even if I did, I'm not sure how that helps a
third party, except so that they can bother me to pass on some sort of
message to the "contact" in question.
(Similarly, I would interpret "parent" to be the same as "up" in a
hyperlink context. By contrast, "friend" or "crush" are far more obvious.)